Advanced Audio Technologies (HRTF, Dolby Atmos, etc) *echo*

[Entropy]

25-30 years back I was interested in positional audio and binaural recording. I eventually ran out of interest in sound field recording because it didn’t really lend itself to recording music if there were other people than the musicians around, and it didn’t really work out too well with films either (and this is where relevance enters) because it didn’t match up with the input of my eyes which was a screen in front of me. Even though the sound field was extremely accurate, the mismatch with the visual impression was actually immersion breaking when the goal was to increase immersion.
I have that experience even in cinemas - if sounds from the sides or back are distinct it takes me out of the film, and into the theater. (VR being an opportunity going forward.)

Anyone else who have that experience?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Absolutely. Very vivid memories of a friend's new surround sound system and an animated movie with lots of flames activating in series. IIRC the camera showed the flames but the sound came from the position relative to the character. It's just stupid.

I think like 3D, creators don't appreciate the perceptual logic of the art and end up breaking their creations. In this case, audio and video have two different perspectives - how are our senses supposed to reconcile them? Games and VR movies are the proper place for 3D audio, although I reckon I could do some clever things with 3D audio in a scary movie to freak people out.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Do you not believe that there is a benefit to object-based audio formats and playback systems? Won't speak to the effect in games since I haven't played any games with object-based audio, but in movies it's trivially easy for me to A/B compare during playback and there's a noticeable difference when listening to the object-based soundtracks compared to the base soundtrack. As you would expect when sending more detailed audio information and adding sound emitters in an additional plane to more accurately render that information.

I was mostly talking about all the baloney that is HD audio and the ridiculously overpriced digital audio players which of course still require external amplification in order to power your 500 dollar iems. They sport balanced audio jacks which make for a virtually indistinguishable listending experience compared to the good old dynamic jacks. Still, you need new headphones ot at least rewire the old ones with a cable that's 50 bucks in order to use it. They also have discrete decoder chips for various frequencies. Essentially you pay 1000 bucks for a device that maybe sounds 5 percent better than a cheap mid-tier smartphone and comes with a painful user experience.

I've been there.

 

[Sigfried1977]

Yeah, but Sigfried was responding to Scott_Arm, and Scott_Arm was responding to RobertR1, and that whole line was talking about codecs, not positional audio. I don't think Sigfried's comments were part of the current line of discussion. More likely he was reviewing the thread and responded to that post by Scott without appreciating how old it was!

Head, meet nail

 

[London Geezer]

Absolutely. Very vivid memories of a friend's new surround sound system and an animated movie with lots of flames activating in series. IIRC the camera showed the flames but the sound came from the position relative to the character. It's just stupid.

I think like 3D, creators don't appreciate the perceptual logic of the art and end up breaking their creations. In this case, audio and video have two different perspectives - how are our senses supposed to reconcile them? Games and VR movies are the proper place for 3D audio, although I reckon I could do some clever things with 3D audio in a scary movie to freak people out.

Well I’d blame that on a poorly conceived mix, or a wrong setup. And not really indicative of what positional audio such as 5.1 and anything above that is meant to do. Surround should add to the experience, not make it more ‘confusing’ in our brains.

 

[London Geezer]

I mean I’m literally watching The Fifth Element in 4K Bluray right now, with the Atmos track, and this for example is a crazy soundtrack that was mixed way after the movie was even made.

They could have gone crazy with surround sounds all over the place that could have been completely out of place. Instead they went crazy on all fronts, but everything is in the right place. It is by far one of the best Atmos mixes I can say I’ve experienced on my setup.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well I’d blame that on a poorly conceived mix, or a wrong setup. And not really indicative of what positional audio such as 5.1 and anything above that is meant to do. Surround should add to the experience, not make it more ‘confusing’ in our brains.

It should, but it's how it's used that doesn't. Obviously some artists will do a better job than others. It's akin to 3D movies, where you have objects in the foreground that are blurred with DOF in the camera, so you can't focus on them. It's plain wrong and something cinematographers in 3D didn't know they had to address. Longer term, the language of 3D might have been better understood save for the fact people don't like it and it's going the way of the Dodo.

 

[Sigfried1977]

It should, but it's how it's used that doesn't. Obviously some artists will do a better job than others. It's akin to 3D movies, where you have objects in the foreground that are blurred with DOF in the camera, so you can't focus on them. It's plain wrong and something cinematographers in 3D didn't know they had to address. Longer term, the language of 3D might have been better understood save for the fact people don't like it and it's going the way of the Dodo.

Well, 3d films are and have always been required to work just as well in 2d. That's even more true now that the 3d fad has completely vanished from anything but movie theaters. DOF is both a byproduct of camera lenses and an essential tool for conveying the most important information in a 2d presentation. Without DOF, movies are gonna look like crap on anything but a 3d capable screen, so I doubt DOF is gonna go away anytime soon. On the contrary, thanks to more frequent uses of Imax lenses and the arrival of Red Epic and Arri Alexa (which have much wider frames than a 35 mm film camera) , DOF has gotten stronger if anything.

 

[mrcorbo]

I was mostly talking about all the baloney that is HD audio and the ridiculously overpriced digital audio players which of course still require external amplification in order to power your 500 dollar iems. They sport balanced audio jacks which make for a virtually indistinguishable listending experience compared to the good old dynamic jacks. Still, you need new headphones ot at least rewire the old ones with a cable that's 50 bucks in order to use it. They also have discrete decoder chips for various frequencies. Essentially you pay 1000 bucks for a device that maybe sounds 5 percent better than a cheap mid-tier smartphone and comes with a painful user experience.

I've been there.

OK, gotcha. Yeah, that stuff is stupid. And worse it takes the focus off of the real things that could be done to actually improve the sound quality. Show me a system that, end to end, can automatically compensate for the difference between the reference system/speakers and the playback chain I am using (source/amplification/sound emitter) so that what comes out at the end is the best possible representation of the artist/producer's intent. Then we can stop compressing the source so it sounds good on crap systems. "All you need" are some standards (build on audio over USB-C), some metadata, some DSPs and some algorithms.

And some logos. Can't forget the logos.

 

[Scott_Arm]

OK, gotcha. Yeah, that stuff is stupid. And worse it takes the focus off of the real things that could be done to actually improve the sound quality. Show me a system that, end to end, can automatically compensate for the difference between the reference system/speakers and the playback chain I am using (source/amplification/sound emitter) so that what comes out at the end is the best possible representation of the artist/producer's intent. Then we can stop compressing the source so it sounds good on crap systems. "All you need" are some standards (build on audio over USB-C), some metadata, some DSPs and some algorithms.

And some logos. Can't forget the logos.

I've heard the Bang & Olufsen speakers with active room correction is incredibly good, but those things are in a stupid price range.

For me, it's all about good headphones, because you get the best bang for your buck in terms of audio quality, and rarely require any kind of fancy amplification unless you buy weirdly high impedance headphones. Even then, if you need a headphone amp, those are not too crazy. With a regular stereo setup or home theater there are big diminishing returns after a certain price point. I buy dirt cheap cables and interconnects, good enough amplification and then put most of the money into speakers. But at some point the price keeps going up for marginal improvements.

At one point I thought about building some Linkwitz Lab exotic speakers, as a hobby, but I don't think you can buy any of the pcbs or anything anymore.

 

[Entropy]

OK, gotcha. Yeah, that stuff is stupid. And worse it takes the focus off of the real things that could be done to actually improve the sound quality. Show me a system that, end to end, can automatically compensate for the difference between the reference system/speakers and the playback chain I am using (source/amplification/sound emitter) so that what comes out at the end is the best possible representation of the artist/producer's intent. Then we can stop compressing the source so it sounds good on crap systems. "All you need" are some standards (build on audio over USB-C), some metadata, some DSPs and some algorithms.

And some logos. Can't forget the logos.

I share this sentiment so much, and have done for 30 years.
Once digital recording and more importantly distribution was in place, the audio industry should have turned their attention to the final link, reproduction(*). And since the source was/is pretty much a solved problem, it was time to seriously focus on speakers and rooms or headphones, and how to match that to the original source. That never happened though, instead we got fairy dust and foot stomping salesmen. Bah. From an engineering point of view it’s downright pathetic. And as you point out at this point in time we have the means to embed information about the recording in the distributed material, and there is no problem actually shipping stereo/binaural/multichannel versions (for instance). We can actually solve some problems. But the audio industry seems stuck in peddling placebo and ignoring the elephants in the room. It’s embarrassing.

(*) Of course, the other end of the chain, the original sound recording, is the other weak spot, where not a hell of a lot has happened in the last half century. But at least it is handled by professionals with some kind of budget, so it is way better controlled than the reproduction end.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They can make far more money selling airy-fairy nonsense. The moment tech makes everything perfect, there's competition in gear. You get perfect, scientifically accurate recorded audio and reproduced audio in all gear. How then do you sell fancy shit with 500% markups on your rivals when they do exactly the same thing?

As engineers, I wonder if we could have a multichannel audio format and slap metadata into one of the channels? On the amp, you could read the uncompressed audio for metadata and then silence the channel. Artists would probably embrace the possibility where the AV industry wouldn't.

 

[Davros]

when the xbox one came out some b3d readers were claiming all sorts of capabilities for shape
including the ability to correctly model sound, I thought they were reading too much into it.
later on I asked for examples of games that used these capabilities but was told there were none
the reason given was that the xb1 had only been out a year and devs havn't had time to learn how to use shape
so since its now been out quite a while now do any games correctly model audio
quick test: fire a gun in a large room then fire the same gun in a smaller room preferably tiled like a bathroom
do the gunshots sound the same?

 

[London Geezer]

when the xbox one came out some b3d readers were claiming all sorts of capabilities for shape
including the ability to correctly model sound, I thought they were reading too much into it.
later on I asked for examples of games that used these capabilities but was told there were none
the reason given was that the xb1 had only been out a year and devs havn't had time to learn how to use shape
so since its now been out quite a while now do any games correctly model audio
quick test: fire a gun in a large room then fire the same gun in a smaller room preferably tiled like a bathroom
do the gunshots sound the same?

TLOU2 on PS4 does just that. And I’m pretty sure it did something of the sort in the first game too. I don’t think it’s necessarily something linked to hardware per se.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's not (linked to hardware). Having audio hardware just saves the CPU from having to do it. Shape was also mostly for Kinect. Whether it's been opened up to devs for audio now Kinect is dead, I don't know.

 

[mrcorbo]

They can make far more money selling airy-fairy nonsense. The moment tech makes everything perfect, there's competition in gear. You get perfect, scientifically accurate recorded audio and reproduced audio in all gear. How then do you sell fancy shit with 500% markups on your rivals when they do exactly the same thing?

In speakers, amplifiers, and headphones, materials and craftsmanship will always matter and that would be how you differentiate. [Car Analogy]Moderately-priced cars can do the base job of getting you from point A to B in comfort and safety and can be quite fun to drive as well. There's still a market for luxury cars and exotics, though.[/Car Analogy]

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you are normalising the output to match the input specs, your speakers can't sound better. Perfect speakers (whole audio chain) will result in 100% accurate reproduction. You can't get better than that 100%. Whatever level equipment is needed to achieve that would represent the maximum necessary investment. So let's say it takes a decent mid-level setup, a bunch of capable speakers. You put it in your room, run the calibrator, and now it compensates for speaker characteristics and room characteristics and recreates exactly what the audio author heard during mastering. In such a case, there's no point in $40,000 speakers and $2,000 cables as they'll just achieve the same as the complete $2,000 package. When the measurements are objective, you can actually measure how much you need to spend.

Whereas at the moment, any price tag can be accompanied with a load of poetic hyperbole that subjectively makes the sound better than cheaper gear. If manufacturers lose that, will they really be able to sell $40,000 speakers as,"it sounds exactly the same as far cheaper solutions but is made from graphite and African Blackwood and has been polished by trained bees and that's why it's $40,000"? A/V enthusiasts spend crazy money on the conceit of it sounding better rather than the aesthetics of the gear.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I don't think you'd even want something that sounds exactly like the stuff the mastering engineer was listening too. Reference speakers aren't really built for enjoyment. They sound rather accurate and probably way too hot in the treble frequency range for most people. They are supposed to make it easier to catch flaws. Sure, you cannot get more accurate than a 100%. Doesn't mean you cannot have a significantly more pleasant end user experience, though. You can skip the §2000 cables, though. Those are complete bunk.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If you don't care about reproduction, why the need for authoring metadata? If you want it to remain subjective, you can just keep it as is, with every piece in the chain tweaking the signal and the end user killing it with their EQ adjustments.

 

[mrcorbo]

If you are normalising the output to match the input specs, your speakers can't sound better. Perfect speakers (whole audio chain) will result in 100% accurate reproduction. You can't get better than that 100%. Whatever level equipment is needed to achieve that would represent the maximum necessary investment. So let's say it takes a decent mid-level setup, a bunch of capable speakers. You put it in your room, run the calibrator, and now it compensates for speaker characteristics and room characteristics and recreates exactly what the audio author heard during mastering. In such a case, there's no point in $40,000 speakers and $2,000 cables as they'll just achieve the same as the complete $2,000 package. When the measurements are objective, you can actually measure how much you need to spend.

The physical limitations of the speaker/driver and amplifier are always going to be a factor in the same way that the physical limitations of a display are a factor in its ability to represent a video image.